Recognising good growth

When I wrote last night about Growing the right way I said that startups should aim to grow sustainably. This morning I thought I would say more about what that means, starting with characteristics of unsustainable growth:

Note that many of these statements are conditional on a future event – don’t do X unless Y is likely to happen. It is this future looking element which makes distinguishing between good growth and unsustainable growth tricky and makes it tempting for startups make the case that their unsustainable growth is actually good growth in order to raise money and buy themselves time to figure out the right answers. My post yesterday described the dangers with this approach.

Sustainable growth comes from having a product that customers love, and has the following characteristics: